Wrongs Of Passage

For some women, it’s when they transcend/descend from “Miss” to “Ma’am”. I can’t tell you how many of my friends used to get freaked out by that. I should probably mention that we were all in our 20s at the time. Kinda funny now, though.

“Ma’am” never bothered me, although when someone says “Miss” to me nowadays, I find it both disingenuous and absurd and I don’t put money in his box outside of Trader Joe’s.

But I digress.

Today I passed a benchmark I didn’t even know existed.

At Sprouts (if you don’t have them, they’re sort of a cheaper, non-snotty Whole Foods) in the vitamin section, a pleasant enough middle-aged woman came up and in a furtive, low voice, asked me what she should take “for the sweats.”*

Don’t mind me. I can sigh while you giggle.

Gray hair notwithstanding, it’s easy to forget that I’m not one of the cool kids anymore. Maybe because I didn’t start out cool. I got there on schedule; right after it stopped mattering, though I doubt it ever really did.

Still, it was nice…

… and now it’s gone.

If I have to be a mid-life authority figure, I’ll remind myself that Alice was the most likeable member of the Brady Bunch, and that no one was lovelier than Juliet Mills in “Nanny & the Professor”. You know what I’m saying, people in the appropriate demographic!

Okay, now I’m stuck for more pop culture examples. I think I’ll go finish that article about Kim Gordon in the New Yorker. She turned 60 in April.

Maybe I should’ve called this “Sonic Mid-life.”

*By the way, when I told the nice lady about wild yam cream, she said she didn’t want to use it.